New Head of the USAID Reportedly Stormed Capitol on Jan. 6

USAID, the nation’s primary distributor of foreign aid, remains in DOGE purgatory. Elon Musk says President Donald Trump has agreed to shut it down, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the agency will be absorbed by the State Department. 

Rubio on Monday tapped State Department Director of Foreign Assistance Pete Marocco to take over USAID. Marocco, a former Trump appointee and longtime critic of USAID, was pushed out of the agency during Trump’s first term. He also was allegedly photographed storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

According to NBC News, in 2023 “online sleuths who aided the FBI in cases against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters identified Marocco and his now-wife as being among the rioters who stormed the Capitol in 2021.” The online group Sedition Hunters — which worked to identify participants in the Capitol riot using open source research and facial recognition technology — alleged in November that Marocco and his wife, Merritt Corrigan, entered the Capitol during the riot through a broken window. The pair were allegedly identified using their clothing, jewelry, and the facial recognition software PimEyes. In a November statement to D Magazine, Marocco did not address questions about his alleged participation in the attempted insurrection, but claimed that he was being subjected to “petty smear tactics and desperate personal attacks by politicians with no solutions.” 

Marocco was never charged with offenses related to the assault on the Capitol. 

The Trump loyalist had a tumultuous career in various foreign policy jobs during the president’s first administration. Marocco was reportedly ousted from jobs at the Department of Defense, State Department, and Department of Commerce after clashing with coworkers and officials. 

In 2020, high-level USAID officials wrote a 13-page memo scorching Marocco — then an assistant to the administrator at the USAID Office of Transition Initiatives — accusing him of leveraging his position to benefit his personal political goals over the agency’s mandate. Marocco would frequently “re-litigate decisions or commitments, revoke long-delegated authorities in favor of his personal control, or both,” the memo read, adding that he “has leveraged once-routine administrative processes to reopen previously-approved plans, interrogate and redirect country programs, halt movement on programs, procurements, and people, and inject uncertainty into daily operations and office planning.”

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“There has been and continues to be significant waste of USG resources because of [Marroco’s] directives and decisions. Taxpayer dollars are being wasted through hundreds of USG staff hours squandered on unproductive or duplicative tasks, midstream activity cancellations, ill-advised program pivots, interventions in the PSC contracting process, and in the potential legal liabilities created by  [Marroco’s]  actions,” officials added. Marocco left the agency shortly after, and his  return is doing little to temper the frustration of agency staff.

“What he’s doing now is frighteningly similar to everything he was trying to do at USAID before, but this time he’s destroying it,” one USAID official told NBC News on Tuesday. 

“He hasn’t been responsible for building anything ever. He’s very good at turning things off and questioning things and making people feel uncomfortable. He’s taken apart a lot of things,” said another staffer. 

Marocco isn’t the only questionable Trump loyalist Rubio has brought into the State Department in the past few days. Earlier this week, Semafor reported that disgraced former White House speechwriter Darren Beattie would be tapped to serve as acting under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. 

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Beattie, who was fired from the White House in 2016 after attending a white nationalist conference, has a long history of making racist statements on his social media. 

“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men,” Beattie wrote just last October.

While Marocco was allegedly participating in the riot on Jan. 6, Beattie was tweeting at prominent Black political figures and commentators that it was time for them to “learn” their “place” and “bend the knee to MAGA.” 

According to posts identified Tuesday by CNN’s KFile, in October 2021, Beattie mocked the very agency he has now been appointed to. “Imagine having respect for the State Department,” he wrote.